SILVER mining in antiquity was a dreadfully unpleasant business. Galena, a silver-bearing lead ore mined in Europe, mostly in Iberia, was crushed and heated for hours to yield its silver. The process was nasty but necessary: silver was the main coin of the Mediterranean region, and especially the Roman world. Romans (or, rather, their slaves) worked the mines on an unprecedented scale.

While this silver was crossing palms across Europe, lead fumes from the smelting rose into atmospheric currents that carried them over Greenland, where they settled onto glaciers and were trapped in the ice. This is where climate researchers found them.

Not all the lead trapped in the glacier comes from silver mining, but much of it does. Based on these lead levels, researchers can make an educated guess about the intensity of silver production in western Europe.

Sources from antiquity are full of stories of politics, intrigue, and war, but often sparse on the details of everyday life—much less national accounts. And while Rome’s history is...Continue reading

I was very happy to have blurbed this new and wonderful book by Jonathan Rauch, here is one adapted excerpt:

Like adolescence, the happiness dip at midlife is developmentally predictable, and can be aggravated by isolation, confusion, and self-defeating thought patterns. Like adolescence, it can lead to crisis, but it is not, in and of itself, a crisis. Rather, like adolescence, it generally leads to a happier stage. In short, although adolescence and the trough of the happiness curve are not at all the same biologically, emotionally, or socially, both transitions are commonplace and nonpathological. But one of them has a supportive social environment, whereas the other has … red sports cars.

If you’re doing a specific therapy for a specific problem (as opposed to just trying to vent or organize your thoughts), studies generally find that doing therapy out of a textbook works just as well as doing it with a real therapist.

Goldman researchers pointed to pharmaceutical company Gilead Sciences, which developed a treatment for hepatitis C, as an example of the financial impact treating diseases can have on profits. “In the case of infectious diseases such as hepatitis C, curing existing patients also decreases the number of carriers able to transmit the virus to new patients,” the memo argued.